Making government text messaging more effective with Notify.gov

Many families struggle to get government services because they do not get the right information at the right time. To help address this, GSA’s Public Benefits Studio launched a new government notification service –  Notify.gov. Partners who administer federally funded programs use the service to send text message reminders about government services and benefits programs.

This tool helps GSA meet its priority to deliver the best in digital government services. Notify.gov launched in the fall of 2023. After a year of testing, refinement, learning, and proven impact, Notify.gov has now advanced to a beta phase. To show the benefits and challenges of connecting with people through text messaging, Notify.gov is coordinating with many government agencies to design and evaluate ways to improve how they communicate with the people they serve.

Collecting evidence about the benefits of text messaging

As more government agencies send text messages, we want to make sure these text messages are effectively reaching the intended recipients and helping them meet their needs. In an ongoing project supporting the Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience, two GSA offices –  the Public Benefits Studio and the Office of Evaluation Sciences — are collaborating with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the city of Norfolk, Virginia’s Department of Human Services, to utilize Notify.gov in connection with Norfolk’s administration of the federal Medicaid program. Norfolk DHS sends text message reminders via Notify.gov to families who need to renew their Medicaid coverage, and they want to evaluate how effective those messages are.

Together, we co-designed text message reminders and phone call outreach aimed at building trust and reaching clients at the right time with the right support. We are conducting a randomized evaluation of this outreach to assess whether it helps more clients renew their Medicaid coverage.

Reducing barriers to success

To design the evaluation, we asked Norfolk’s Medicaid enrollees about the existing texting program to identify areas that could potentially improve. We identified two major barriers to better serving Medicaid enrollees:

Barrier #1: Many Medicaid enrollees do not trust text messages

Norfolk shared that some enrollees in the pilot phase were not sure whether the text messages were coming from a trustworthy source, since many enrollees report receiving spam via text. To address this first barrier, we helped design a new text message to establish the text reminders’ credibility.  This “credibility text” informs enrollees that Norfolk will be texting them information about their Medicaid renewals from the same number each time, and that they will never ask enrollees to share personal information over text.

Barrier #2: Many enrollees do not read the text messages

Norfolk also shared that, for some enrollees, text messages might not reach them or else might not be a strong enough reminder to take action. To address this second barrier, we worked with Norfolk to expand their existing phone call outreach so some enrollees would receive a phone call reminder in addition to the text messages.

Norfolk was already making phone calls to some enrollees and learned that these calls were helpful for answering enrollees’ questions. We also designed a new text message to alert these enrollees that they would be receiving a phone call so they would be prepared to answer.

Co-designing a rigorous evaluation

Norfolk manages Medicaid renewals for approximately 800-1,000 enrollees per month. They began sending text messages in November 2023 to all enrollees due to renew their Medicaid coverage.

For the first several months of the text messaging pilot, Norfolk sent enrollees three standard text message reminders over two months with information about how to renew their Medicaid coverage.

During the evaluation period (which started in May), some enrollees were randomly assigned to receive the new outreach –  including the text to establish credibility and the phone call reminder – in addition to the standard text messages.

At the end of the evaluation period, we will measure whether enrollees who received the new outreach were more likely to renew their Medicaid coverage by their deadline compared to those who received the standard outreach. Because enrollees are randomly selected to receive the text outreach, we can determine whether the additional reminders directly cause an increase in renewals. For more details on how we will measure the success of the evaluation, see OES’ analysis plan [PDF].

Embedding evaluation into government services

By evaluating changes to Norfolk’s texting program, we can help people maintain their access to government services and learn how to make text messages from the government more effective. In addition to strong partnerships, there are a few key considerations for ensuring evaluation efforts will be meaningful:

• Randomization: Notify.gov allows us to easily implement a randomized evaluation of text messaging. Government users of Notify.gov can store template text messages and send them to a large number of recipients at once. We provide support to Norfolk to randomly assign their enrollees to different groups. Norfolk then uploads these lists to Notify.gov to easily send different text messages to different lists of enrollees.
• Sample size: Norfolk serves a large population of Medicaid enrollees and works to make sure that client information is up to date. Since we began working with Norfolk, over 30,000 text messages have been sent with an average delivery rate of 87%. This gives us a large enough sample size to analyze.
• Data-sharing: Notify.gov provides information about text message delivery, and Norfolk has access to data on Medicaid renewals. The Office of Evaluation Sciences will use this combined data to measure the impact of the new text message and phone call outreach.

Next steps for communicating with families

Our teams will continue to build evidence to improve how we ensure people are aware of and can access government services.

Notify.gov is working with several other federal benefits programs across the country, including those administered by the State of Washington Department of Social and Health Services and the Arizona Early Intervention Program.

Early partners like Norfolk have helped the Notify.gov team to test and refine the application, and enabled the recent move out of its limited pilot phase into a beta phase, facilitating wider availability of the product to more government agencies and programs. If your program is interested in using Notify.gov, contact us at tts-notify@gsa.gov. If your program is interested in evaluation opportunities with the Office of Evaluation Sciences, contact us at oes@gsa.gov.